是互联网上主要搜索引擎中检索页面最少的一个引擎，可以把它看成Excite的简化版。少的检索意味着WebCrawler不适合查询一些模糊和不常见的信息，然而，有人也认为正是因为由于检索页面少，WebCrawler对于查询一些一般性的词不会得到过多的查询结果。
WebCrawler于1994年四月20日对外发布，最初是作为华盛顿大学的一个研究项目。
WebCrawler was the first full text search engine. It went live on April 20, 1994 and was created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington.
See WebCrawler for the specific search engine of that name.—-A web crawler (also known as a web spider or ant) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches